Authorship - Publishing Your Book On Your Own

A Review - by S. Brown

It is said that everyone over the age of forty has a story worth writing a book about. OK, that is not what is
said exactly, but if you put the two sayings together, that is what comes out, isn't it?

Authorship - Publishing Your Book On Your Own

So, seeing as most people would not have a clue how to go about writing that book and even less of an idea about
publishing and promoting it, Owen Jones has written this book on authorship to help would-be authors get their book
out of themselves and into the hands of the people who would like to read it.

There are many authors who dread publishing their book with the major distributors. Maybe they have tried and
failed or just did not understand how to publish a book because of the jargon. The world of book publishing and
authorship has its own terminology too as has that of computers.

'Authorship - Publishing Your Book On Your Own' by Owen Jones is a manual for would-be writers and existing
writers who would like the experience of self-publishing their books themselves instead of paying others to do it
for them.

Seen from this point of view, the book is actually in two halves. The first third is about actually writing your
novel. How to overcome first-novel- nerves, how to stay motivated and writing a book in general, but he does not
dwell on the subject for longer than necessary.

Then we get to the part that most indie-authors need to know - especially those that are not 100% computer
literate or au fait with the world of publishing. From this point on, the book and it's author assume that you have
a manuscript in electronic format or an 'escript' as Mr. Jones calls it.

The book guides you, the writer through the different formatting techniques necessary in order to produce a
print-ready copy of your escript and a digital copy for your ebook. It then presents you with the names of the four
major printers and distributors that require printed or electronic formats: Amazon, which owns Kindle and
CreateSpace; Lulu; Smashwords; and XinXii.

Amazon and Lulu can produce both print and ebook formats, but none of these four major printers and distributors
accept escripts in exactly the same format, so the book takes the reader through how to produce the escript
required by each printer and distributor.

The book makes the whole business of production and promotion and publishing a book look pretty simple and
it sounds far easier to do than the reams of instructions provided by the 'Big Four' themselves. The book then
proceeds to explain which of these 'Big Four' will most likely get your work into Apple's worldwide iBookstore and
Barnes & Noble successfully and which have sold the most for Mr. Jones.

This is valuable information in its own right since two of the 'Big Four' charge up to $75 to get you listed in
the content of their catalogues and yet the other two do it free of charge. Presumably, once you are in these
catalogues you are in, so why pay?

Mr. Jones has published well-over a hundred books on 'how to...' do things, a trilogy of 350,000 words and three
novellas. This year alone, he has written and published nine books and that is only until August 2013, so I think
that we can safely assume that he knows what he is talking about and at $3.99, it is a steal since it could easily
save you 20-50 times that on your first publication alone.